AMD’s Analyst Day confirms APU cancellations, trims core counts

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AMD’s Analyst Day kicks off today and the news is starting to flow. Additional details will be disclosed throughout the various presentations, so we’ll update this story or publish follow-ups as appropriate.

So what are the headlines so far? As we expected, AMD has canceled its Krishna and Wichita APUs that were to follow Brazos, in favor of what it calls Brazos 2.0. Brazos 2.0, as it turns out, looks just like Brazos 1.0, but with minimally faster clock speeds and USB 3.0 tossed in. We spoke with the company yesterday in a pre-briefing.

This could be problematic for the company’s lower-end products. Qualcomm has given notice that it intends to push into the netbook market late this year or early next, while Brazos’ 40nm technology will face competition from Intel’s 32nm Atom, as well as 28nm Qualcomm and Cortex-A15 chips.

Hondo — a chip we discussed last August, and rumored to be cancelled — is still on target. It’s a respun version of Brazos that’s been rearchitected for low-power operation. AMD has had several wins with Desna, its 5.9W TDP tablet option; Hondo brings this down to 4.9W. With Microsoft’s Windows 8 not expected until the end of the year, AMD has time to ready something more competitive before the x86 tablet market really takes off.

Come 2013, we’ve got debuts from Temash, Kabini, Kaveri, and Sea Islands, AMD’s next-generation graphics core. Temash will use the next-generation Jaguar CPU core and will be AMD’s first SoC, building on the expertise that AMD gains from Hondo. Kabini, meanwhile, uses the same core but fits into a slightly higher power envelope. It’s not clear if Kabini is also an SoC or not — keeping a separate APU part would give AMD more die space to devote to CPU/GPU processing cores.

Finally, there’s Steamroller, a third-generation Bulldozer core and what AMD calls “HSA” (Heterogeneous System Architecture) features. Based on the current rate of progression, the GPU at the heart of Temash, Kabini, and Kaveri will be based on AMD’s Tahiti (aka 7900). The Trinity GPU is based on Cayman.

This slide breaks down the differences between mobile and desktop. One surprising factor in AMD’s pre-briefing is that the third-generation CPU at the heart of Kabini and Kaveri doesn’t appear to have a high-end variant — at least not in 2013. AMD also intends to move to 28nm production in 2013. GlobalFoundries has a 28nm-SHP process that uses SOI, but everything we’ve heard from the foundry suggests that 28nm is a very modest improvement over 32nm as far as power consumption is concerned. As we’ve explored recently, however, modest improvements are the best the semiconductor industry can deliver these days.

The left-hand column shows server plans for 2012, the right side is 2013. This new roadmap is significantly different from slides that leaked back in August. At that point, AMD’s plan was to release new platforms, with 10 and 20-core Bulldozer chips launching in 2012 on 32nm, followed by 28nm die shrinks in 2013. As the new slide shows, AMD’s G34 and C32 platforms will survive through 2012. According to company executives, the performance improvements from Piledriver are significant enough to make the switch to deca-core and icosa-core processors unnecessary. Instead, AMD will hold upper core counts steady at octal and hexadeca levels. (This crash course in Greek nomenclature brought to you by the letter Qoppa).

This is good news. AMD’s previous guidance implied Piledriver would deliver a 10-15% improvement in performance-per-watt. Hopefully the company managed to exceed that target — but even if it didn’t, what BD needs is a combination of improved architectural efficiency, faster caches, and higher clock speeds. AMD’s roadmap doesn’t show anything beyond 32nm — a discrepancy that may be explained by the following older slide.

“Bulldozer NG,” in this case, is Piledriver. Given that the company has canceled its original plan to move to a new platform and 10/20-core architecture in 2013, it’s possible that AMD’s server platforms will move directly from the configuration on the far left to the far right, SoC-style implementation. Historically, AMD’s desktop and server CPUs have been tightly linked as far as their CPU architectures are concerned — the fact that we don’t see third-generation CPU core anywhere in 2013 could mean that the company will move to a unified SoC for servers and high-end desktop in 2014.

There’s still considerable question as to Trinity’s CPU performance and whether it’ll be strong enough to keep AMD competitive with Intel through 2012. The good news is that things should improve in 2013 with the launch of new 28nm hardware across the company’s entire product line.

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